Is GE trees safer than GM crops?

For:

The proponents of the technology claim that GE trees are safer and there is no need to fear about negative consequences. Already the United Nations has approved plantations of GE trees as carbon sinks under Kyoto Protocol’s clean development mechanism. With this stamp of approval, many countries would like to adopt the technology and establish GE plantations.

Against:

Environmentalists state that this technology poses as serious a threat as GM crops. The trees are perennial, that live longer than agricultural crops. The changes in the metabolism of trees may occur many years after they are planted, and trees are wild, undomesticated. This makes it difficult to decipher as to how the introduced gene will behave in natural environment. This fact implies that the ecological risks associated with GE trees are far greater than the agricultural crops.

It has also been documented that the tree pollen travels a distance of more than 600 km. The probability that the GE tree pollen is likely to contaminate vast expanses of native forests with a wide variety of destructive traits may be a threat to ecological balance and the existing biodiversity of the tropical forests in global south. The contaminated pollen might pose threat to honey bees, adversely impacting pollination in the wild and on agriculture crops.